This article seeks to develop Translanguaging as a theory of language and discuss the theoretical motivations behind and the added values of the concept. I contextualize Translanguaging in the linguistic realities of the 21st century, especially the fluid and dynamic practices that transcend the boundaries between named languages, language varieties, and language and other semiotic systems. I highlight the contributions Translanguaging as a theoretical concept can make to the debates over the Language and Thought and the Modularity of Mind hypotheses. One particular aspect of multilingual language users’ social interaction that I want to emphasize is its multimodal and multisensory nature. I elaborate on two related concepts: Translanguaging Space and Translanguaging Instinct, to underscore the necessity to bridge the artificial and ideological divides between the so-called sociocultural and the cognitive approaches to Translanguaging practices. In doing so, I respond to some of the criticisms and confusions about the notion of Translanguaging.

Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language

THE PHENOMENON OF MULTILINGUALISM is as old as humanity, but multilingualism has been catapulted to a new world order in the 21st century. Social relations, knowledge structures, and webs of power are experienced bymany people as highly mobile and interconnected—for good and for bad—as a result of broad sociopolitical events and global markets. As a consequence, today’s multilingualism is enmeshed in globalization, technologization, and mobility. Communication and meaning-making are often felt as deterritorialized, that is, lived as something “which does not belong to one locality but which organizes translocal trajectories and wider spaces” (Blommaert, 2010, p. 46), while language use and learning are seen as emergent, dynamic, unpredictable, open ended, and intersubjectively negotiated. In this context, increasingly numerous and more diverse populations of adults and youth become multilingual and transcultural later in life, either by elective choice or by forced circumstances, or for a mixture of reasons. They must learn to negotiate complex demands and opportunities for varied, emergent competencies across their languages. Understanding such learning requires the integrative consideration of learners’ mental and neurobiological processing, remembering and categorizing patterns, and momentto-moment use of language in conjunction with a variety of socioemotional, sociocultural, sociopolitical, and ideological factors. The field of second language acquisition (SLA) seeks (a) to understand the processes by which school-aged children, adolescents, and adults learn and use, at any point in life, an additional language, including second, foreign,

A Transdisciplinary Framework for SLA in a Multilingual World

The expanding orientations to translingualism are motivated by a gradual shift from the structuralist paradigm that has been treated as foundational in modern linguistics. Structuralism encouraged scholars to consider language, like other social constructs, as organized as a self-defining and closed structure, set apart from spatiotemporal ‘context’ (which included diverse considerations such as history, geography, politics, and society). Translingualism calls for a shift from these structuralist assumptions to consider more mobile, expansive, situated, and holistic practices. In this article, I articulate how a poststructuralist paradigm might help us theorize and practice translingualism according to a spatial orientation that embeds communication in space and time, considering all resources as working together as an assemblage in shaping meaning. I illustrate from my ongoing research with international STEM scholars in a Midwestern American university to theorize how translingualism will redefine the role of constructs such as language, non-verbal artifacts, and context in communicative proficiency.

Translingual Practice as Spatial Repertoires: Expanding the Paradigm beyond Structuralist Orientations

Applied linguistics is a field concerned with issues pertaining to language(s) and literacies in the real world and with the people who learn, speak, write, process, translate, test, teach, use, and lose them in myriad ways. It is also fundamentally concerned with transnationalism, mobility, and multilingualism—the movement across cultural, linguistic, and (often) geopolitical or regional borders and boundaries. The field is, furthermore, increasingly concerned with identity construction and expression through particular language and literacy practices across the life span, at home, in diaspora settings, in short-term and long-term sojourns abroad for study or work, and in other contexts and circumstances. In this article, I discuss some recent areas in which applied linguists have investigated the intersections of language (multilingualism), identity, and transnationalism. I then present illustrative studies and some recurring themes and issues.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S026719051400018X

Transnationalism, Multilingualism, and Identity

Today, scholars and students face an array of lingualisms: bilingualism, multilingualism, polylingualism, metrolingualism plurilingualism, codeswitching, codemeshing, and translanguaging, among others. Plurilingualism can be understood as the study of individuals’ repertoires and agency in several languages, in different contexts, in which the individual is the locus and actor of contact; accordingly, a person’s languages and cultures interrelate and change over time, depending on individual biographies, social trajectories, and life paths. The term ‘plurilingual competence’ adds emphasis on learners’ agency, and constraints and opportunities in educational contexts. We discuss where and how plurilingualism fits among the other lingualisms, its similarities and differences, with an example of plurilingual pedagogy and practice from a university in Vancouver, Canada. In doing so, we challenge three common critiques of/misconceptions about plurilingualism: (i) that it is based on an invalid static b...

Plurilingualism amid the panoply of lingualisms: addressing critiques and misconceptions in education

There are thousands of ethnic Chinese students from very different backgrounds in British universities today, a fact that has not been fully appreciated or studied from an applied linguistics perspective. For example, there are third- or fourth-generation British-born Chinese; there are students from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore who have received whole or part of their primary and secondary education in Britain; and there are Chinese students who completed their schooling in their home countries. To add to the diversity of the Chinese student population, several distinctive varieties of Chinese are spoken as well as different varieties of English and other languages. In terms of their choice of language and social networks, the Chinese students have several options, including, for example, staying with their own language variety group (e.g. Cantonese, Mandarin); staying with their own region-of-origin group (e.g. British-born, Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong); and creating new transnational and multilingual groupings. This article focuses on a group of Chinese university students who have chosen to create transnational and multilingual networks. Through analysis of narrative data and ethnographic observations, we explore issues such as their socio-cultural identification processes, the interactions between their linguistic and political ideologies; their multilingual practices and what they have learned from being part of this new social space.

/pdf/translanguaging-identities-and-ideologies-creating-16opb1rsjj.pdf

Translanguaging Identities and Ideologies: Creating Transnational Space Through Flexible Multilingual Practices Amongst Chinese University Students in the UK

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Translanguaging Identities and Ideologies: Creating Transnational Space Through Flexible Multilingual Practices Amongst Chinese University Students in the UK